Harvard University President, Gay Succumbs To Pressure, Resigns Amid Plagiarism Claims

Harvard University President Claudine Gay has resigned from his position amid allegations of plagiarism.

 

According to Reuters, Gay’s resignation was announced by the Harvard Crimson student newspaper

 

Gay’s resignation made the shortest in Harvard’s history and the second Ivy League leader to resign after controversy over their congressional testimony last month about antisemitism on campus.

 

Gay has faced accusations of plagiarism. A university official said she planned to submit three changes to her 1997 dissertation after a committee investigating plagiarism charges against her discovered citation problems.

 

Gay, Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on December 5, 2023 about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.

 

The leaders declined to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ bullying and harassment codes of conduct, citing the need to balance free speech rights.

 

More than 70 U.S. senators signed a letter urging that the three colleges’ governing bodies remove the presidents, expressing displeasure with their testimony.

 

Gay did, however, receive support from some of her Harvard colleagues. Several hundred faculty members signed a petition last month urging school administrators not to cave to political pressure and dismiss the school’s president because of her testimony.